Words by Michael Tyson
Every August, South Australia has a Small Business Week. There’s an expo, a run of workshops, plenty of goodwill on social media, and for seven days “shop local” gets an airing it doesn’t get the other fifty-one weeks of the year.
I run a small coffee subscription out of Adelaide, so I should love this week. I don’t hate it. But if I’m honest, it doesn’t move much. Most people scroll past it. The businesses posting about it are mostly other small businesses, talking to each other in a room nobody else walked into.
Here’s the bit that gets me. The days people spend the most money all year aren’t small business days. They’re Black Friday, Boxing Day, the big hallmark retail moments, and those are exactly the days small independent businesses are worst placed to compete on. Big brands can discount harder because they buy in bulk. They can outspend everyone on ads because they’ve got the budget to burn. A week of well-wishing in August doesn’t touch any of that. Small Business Week isn’t aimed at nothing, it’s just aimed at the wrong problem. Most people already know their local roaster or their local butcher exists. Awareness was never the issue. The real gap is that the moments people open their wallets are exactly the moments small businesses can least afford to be in the room for.
What would help isn’t a week. It’s people having a bit more skin in the game the rest of the year, not out of guilt, just as a normal habit. Choosing the local option first, not only when a hashtag tells you to. A one-off purchase during Small Business Week feels good for a day. A customer who comes back in October, and March, and whenever they run out, is the one who keeps the lights on.
I can tell you what that looks like from the inside. Allways Coffee is a two-person operation most of the time, run in and around normal family life rather than a tidy nine-to-five. It’s a constant rollercoaster, some days it feels like real progress, other days it feels like you’re going backwards and the list just got longer. There’s no backup shift to call in when an order needs sorting the same day a kid’s sick. That’s just how it goes. Nothing like the ad budget and the customer service team sitting behind the big brand running the Boxing Day sale next to you.
So this Small Business Week, my ask isn’t “shop small for a week.” It’s simpler than that: pick one local business you already like, and keep buying from them once the week’s over. Not glamorous, but it’s the only version of this that works.
Mikey runs Allways Coffee, an Adelaide coffee subscription sourcing beans from independent local roasters. allways.coffee
